International student mobility as “aspiration on the go”: stories from African students at a Chinese university

Abstract

This article examines international student mobility (ISM) as a process of “aspiration on the go” for African students in China—a burgeoning yet under-researched international student flow. Drawing on 15 months of fieldwork at a Chinese university, we present ethnographic case studies of African students that unveil their varied aspirations for travelling to study in China and, more importantly, reflect the diversity and dynamics of their aspirations on the go in confrontation with the realities they have encountered during their stay. We demonstrate that students’ aspirations might be preserved, transformed, reconfigured, placed on hold or go well to realisation, each of which impacts their ISM navigation, such as decisions to leave, to stay or to move to another university/country. We argue that adopting a dynamic and processual approach is important for rethinking international student aspirations and mobilities, in that it not only identifies nuances that diversify our understanding of what international education may mean for different individuals—especially for those from less-privileged backgrounds in an ISM flow within the Global South—but also bridges such binaries as imagination and reality, promise and precarity and structural force and agency that are usually treated separately in the literature of ISM.